e
or outside. Of course it's all true; I sometimes think I can almost
remember things.... I'm sure I can."

Barty and Leah were well pleased with me when they came home that
night.

That Marty was doomed to an early death did not very deeply distress
them. It is astonishing how lightly they thought of death, these
people for whom life seemed so full of joy; but that she should ever
be conscious of the anguish of her lot while she lived was to them
intolerable--a haunting preoccupation.

To me, a narrower and more selfish person, Marty had almost become
to me life itself--her calamity had made her mine forever; and life
without her had become a thing not to be conceived: her life was my
life.

That life of hers was to be even shorter than we thought, and I love
to think that what remained of it was made so smooth and sweet by
what I told her that night.

I read all Martia's blaze letters to her, and helped her to read
them for herself, and so did Barty. She got to know them by
heart--especially the last; she grew to talk as Martia wrote; she
told me of strange dreams she had often had--dreams she had told
Sparrow and her own brothers and sisters when she was a
child--wondrous dreams, in their seeming confirmation of what seemed
to us so impossible. Her pains grew slighter and ceased.

And now her whole existence had become a dream--a tranquil, happy
dream; it showed itself in her face, its transfigured, unearthly
beauty--in her cheerful talk, her eager sympathy; a kind of heavenly
pity she seemed to feel for those who had to go on living out their
normal length of days. And always the old love of fun and frolic and
pretty tunes.

Her father would make her laugh till she cried, and the same fount
of tears would serve when Mary sang Brahms and Schubert and Lassen
to her--and Roberta played Chopin and Schumann by the hour.

So she might have lived on for a few years--four or five--even ten.
But she died at seventeen, of mere influenza, very quickly and
without much pain. Her father and mother were by her bedside when
her spirit passed away, and Dr. Knight, who had brought her into the
world.

She woke from a gentle doze and raised her head, and called out in a
clear voice:

"_Barty--Leah--come, to me, come!_"

And fell back dead.

Barty bowed his head and face on her hand, and remained there as if
asleep. It was Leah who drew her eyelids down.

An hour later Dr. Knight came to me, his face distorted with